Your Smile Gives You Away

In a winning scenario, smiling can decrease your odds of success against the same opponent in subsequent matches, according to new research presented by the USC Institute for Creative Technologies and sponsored by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory.

People who smiled during victory increased the odds of their opponent acting aggressively to steal a pot of money rather than share it in future gameplay, according to a paper presented in May at the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems by USC ICT research assistant Rens Hoegen, USC ICT research programmer Giota Stratou and Jonathan Gratch, director of virtual humans research at USC ICT and a professor of computer science at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering.

Conversely, researchers found smiling during a loss tended to help the odds of success in the game going forward.